My goal for this course is to learn more about educational software.  I hope to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using educational software with students and find some educational software resources. 

            I plan to evaluate an educational software “pack” by The Learning Company for grades 4-6.  The “pack” includes Carmen Sandiego - Math Detective, Zoombinis - Logical Journey, Super Solvers - Spellbound, and Amazon Trail.  After evaluating the software myself (by playing the 4 CD-ROMs), I will enlist my 6^th grade brother and my 5^th grade female neighbor to evaluate the software as well.  I will have them play each CD-ROM for a certain amount of time (or more if they wish).  After they are finished, I will ask them some questions about the CD-ROM and their experiences with it, including the amount they learned from it and their level of interest.  I will record their responses as well as the amount of time they spent using each CD-ROM in order to draw some conclusions about the software and educational software in general.  I also plan to find more educational software resources by searching the internet and asking peers for recommendations.  I will then create a list of all the resources along with age levels, subjects included, and any other relevant information.

            I choose this project because I think it will be very beneficial to my future teaching and it will give me a great introduction to educational software.  I think that some great educational software can provide students with memorable learning experiences and my job as a future teacher is to find that great software.  This course will help me become familiar with evaluating software, which is a skill that I will need in order to make computer time successful for students.  It will also provide me with some good one-on-one experiences with students in the age range that I would most like to teach.  I think my greatest challenge will understand how my two young evaluators really feel about the CD-ROMs.  Therefore, my next step is to compose some specific and quality questions to ask them.

The World of eBay

            For years eBay has been something that I was unsure of using, because I was afraid that somehow I would be taken advantage of, fooled, or misled into something that I didn’t want or buying something that was defective.  For one thing, I had never had anything I wanted to sell in an auction before. Another reason I haven’t tried selling items on eBay is because it seemed somewhat complicated and time consuming.  I think as more and more people I know have bought or sold things on eBay, it has heightened my interest and confidence to try eBay as well.

            Lately, I have wanted to consolidate some of my things, especially items that I don’t use or have been sitting in my closet, taking up space for years.  Of these items are my Breyer Horse (model horse) collection and my collection of Lee Middleton Dolls.  I had loved these things ten years ago, but no longer need them.  The thought of selling these collections on eBay had occurred to me, but I have never sold anything on eBay before and I didn’t know how to go about the process.  Coincidentally, I was planning on learning how to sell items on eBay this summer anyway.  Also, the money I will receive from selling my collection will go towards buying a digital camera.  In short, this is a something involving the novel use of computers for commerce between people that I have wanted to learn to do and that I have never done before.  This project is a great opportunity and will give me a chance to reflect on my experiences and what I will have learned.

            In my eagerness, I have already gotten started on this project over the last week.  Last night I borrowed my aunt’s digital camera and today I took pictures of all my horses and dolls I want to sell on eBay.  The pictures are now on my computer and ready for eBay.  I have also researched on eBay what prices some of the horses and dolls are selling at.  Most of my items however, are not on eBay currently.  From researching I have found that pictures and the description of the item are essential.  I have much more to learn and have yet to put any items up for sale on eBay, but I created an account as a seller yesterday, and learned more about the different options and prices there are for selling items on eBay. 

            I plan on selling, or at least trying to sell, 14 horses and five dolls.  I really have no idea what will happen in the auctions, but I am excited to see the results.  If my experiences go well and after having the experience of selling a few items, I’m sure I will feel more comfortable and have more confidence selling items to and buying items from other people through sites such as eBay. I will have the opportunity to experience yet another way computers help people connect with each other. 

Learning Software

The project that I decided to undertake for Education 384 was to learn and then teach the Macromedia Director MX program.  I had never tried creating a production in Director before.  The first few times that I used the Director program it didn’t go as well as I had hoped.  It took me awhile to figure out how to create casts and scores to assemble an overall movie.  Once I figured out how to get pictures and sound inserted, I needed to figure out how to adjust the timing.  After I figured out the basics of the Director, I managed to create a movie of the vacation that I had recently gone on.

            After making my movie, I decided to teach what I had learned about the Director MX program to another person.  We used the program to create a professional industrial design portfolio presentation.  By applying the knowledge that I had recently acquired, we managed to create a different type of movie and found a few other different things, such as effects and meters, which we could add to create a more dynamic presentation.  The presentation that was created was fully interactive rather than a simple slide presentation.  It was developed similar to a web page or DVD menu.  This allowed for active interaction of the presented portfolio presentation, as well as a means of quick access of requested information during a presentation.

            By learning this program I now have another form of software that I can use for my future presentations in classes as well as in my own future classroom.  By teaching another person the software, I was able to adjust my teaching methods to better fit their learning style, as well as adapt to the type of content being taught.  This project was a good learning experience that I will be able to use to my advantage in the future. 

Note:  Other students have done work in I movie, Blogs to plan or support a wedding, investigating some of the major free email services and teaching their grandparents, or just about any major piece of software that had an application to their classroom or lives.

Below are a few reflections:

Computers and technology have had a huge impact on human society in the past decade.  Computers are getting faster everyday and trying to keep up with the change in times is next to impossible.  A benefit to the forever changing world of computers is keeping important keepsakes and memorable photos on the increasingly large hard drives.  Nowadays computers are made with CD burners and DVD burners making it easy to transfer these photos to a high capacity medium.  I recently purchased a Dell laptop computer complete with a CD/DVD burner to accommodate such needs. 

            I came up with my idea of making a DVD of my grandparents’ life together in part by a project I did back in high school.  I took the yearbook class my senior.  It was in this class that I was introduced to the basics of movie making via the iMovie program on a Mac computer.  In it I had to use a video camera and edit what I filmed into a short 5 minute video to share with the class.  In my short film I did a “Where is this found?” video of random areas around my high school, and I really enjoyed the process involved with movie making.  Since I have a Dell computer run by Microsoft Windows I was not able to use iMovie (not willing to pay an arm and a leg for it either), so I learned a little about Windows Movie Maker to produce my grandparents DVD. 

            I was debating on whether or not to purchase a program to make the DVD, but then I talked to my friend who told me about Windows Movie Maker.  I was able to download the version on the internet, for free, which was great for me as I really didn’t want to buy a movie making program.  Once the download was completed, I was ready to get rolling on the project.  The first thing I did was contact my family, all of my aunts, uncles, as well as my parents and grandparents to find and send old photos of them and their families.  It was after this I realized that I had no means to upload these photos into my computer.  I high-tailed it over to Staples and purchased an all-in-one printer, scanner, photocopier.  It took about a week to get all the pictures in my possession to start scanning in the images onto my hard drive. 

            The scanning process was the most tedious procedure in the whole process of making this DVD.  I scanned images for a total of 8 hours, consisting of about 250 photos of my whole extended family.  One of the reasons it took so long was that I tried to organize the pictures into who was in the pictures, and a timeline of when the picture was taken.  The next procedure in the making of this film was editing, cropping and fixing the photos to ensure the clearest and most important areas of the pictures.  During this process I started to really organize the images into folders.  I made 36 different folders, in which folders were placed into folders.  I sorted the images into individuals, group images of the cousins ranging from 2 to all 9 of us.  It was soon after this that I was able to start using the Movie Maker program to begin the actual movie making process. 

            Windows Movie Maker is an easy program to use.  The first thing I did was make a beginning slide to state the purpose and name of the DVD.  In this slide I was able to choose the font, color and size of the writing used in the beginning credits.  The program also allowed me to choose and change the way the writing appeared on the screen within the movie.  It was fun using the different options to find the perfect text for my grandparents DVD. I then started importing images of my grandfather from his early years until the time he met my grandmother.  I then proceeded to do the same with my grandmother after making a new slide to introduce my grandmother to the show. 

            From there I added a section of my grandparents’ life together, and then followed with individual sections of their children, my mother, aunt and uncle.  It was really fun to view all of these photos and organize them into an order watching them grow through the years.  From there I moved on to myself in my cousins, in chronological order from the oldest to the youngest, as well as group photos of the individual families within my grandparents children, my mother, aunt and uncles families.  Once I achieved the importation of all of the images into the Movie Maker program and placed them where I felt suited the flow of movie best I decided to add a little music the picture show. 

            This part was tough for me because I thought many songs would do the movie good, but realistically I needed to find songs that my grandparents would enjoy.  I also wanted to pick songs from my grandparents’ favorite era, the oldies, but not any oldies the good old days of music, the polka.  Every Sunday my grandfather gets up and listens to the “Old Tyme Hour,” it is here my grandfather hears his favorite polka tunes.  I really wanted to incorporate my grandfather’s favorite group the Mills Brothers into his portion of the DVD. My grandparents were farmers their entire life and growing up they would employ my parents to aid them on the farm during the summer months my parents had off as they are teachers.  As a consequence, I would always heard stories of my grandfather and father working together in the barn listening to the Old Tyme Hour and my father changing the music, as he did not like 3 hours of polka every Sunday morning.  This would go on for the entire duration of the program.  I thought it would be nice to add the Mills Brothers to the DVD. 

            It was extremely easy to import music from my song library into the Movie Maker program.  I made the Mills Brothers play during my grandfather’s first part of his portion of the DVD.  I found music from the era in which the picture was taken to use during the progression through the years.  I tried to stick to the timeline of progression as closely as possible, but in some cases I just figured some songs would work better in different sections.  I have twin brothers, who are the oldest of the grandchildren; I used “Life is a Highway” because they were always on the run growing up.  It was very fun picking and sorting through music to find to add to the DVD. 

            In the Movie Maker program you can choose how long you want the image to show up on the screen.  This was a great option in trying to match the images and the songs from start and stop time.  This was also nice because in some of the younger images of my cousins a few of them were naked, so out of kindness I decided to show those images at a faster pace than some of the others.  I was amazed at the ease of use of the Movie Maker program.  Originally thought that it would be tougher to understand than iMovie, but found that it was just as easy to use. 

            The Movie Maker program made it simple to add transitions between the different pictures.  All of the transitions looked really good and it was fun to try them out between the pictures.  There are about 60 transitions to choose from ranging from fade in to swipes from all directions of the screens.  Along with the transitions the program makes has visual effects that add more to the video other than just the pictures. The video effects are neat because you can turn the images into different colors, blur the images or use a smudging effect to add more effects. Similar to adjusting the length of pictures you can adjust the length and time of the transitions and other visual effects.

            Now that all the images were set to music and the visual effects and transitions were in place all that was left was saving and recording to the DVD.  This procedure took a little longer than anticipated.  First of all I bought the wrong style of recordable DVD media, apparently there is two kinds of recordable DVD, DVD plus and DVD minus.  On my DVD burner I found in tiny letters that the compatible DVD media is DVD plus, and I had purchased DVD minus.  Once this problem was solved I noticed that a DVD can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes of space, and the movie I had just completed was only 1.2 gigabytes leaving me with plenty of space.  However, problems occurred when I tried to save the movie onto the DVD.  It ran through the process but would pause about midway and the timer would read that I had to wait 3600 minutes for the video to finish.  For some reason my 45 minute video would not transfer to the DVD.  I called every friend I had who has knowledge of computers, and none of us could figure it out.  All that work, I would say close to 20 hours that I spent making this movie went to waste. 

            I browsed through the “How to save and share movies” tutorial section of the Movie Maker program, although helpful it did not solve my problem.  I was extremely frustrated with the program and I was ready to quit.  Until I decided that I should try to split up the movie into different sections.  It was this that saved me from throwing my computer against a wall.  I decided to have my grandparents have their own section.  The entire first DVD was of my grandparents growing up and their life together.  I feel that this worked for the better because then when my grandparents want to watch the movie they can just pick the part they want to see.  The second DVD consisted of my grandparents and their children’s lives together growing up on the farm.  This left the third DVD to contain the grandchildren, thus completing my work. 

            I was not done, while shopping at Wal-Mart one day I saw a device that you can print and place your own CD and DVD labels.  I thought it fitting to use this to make print-outs for my grandparents DVD.   I used some of the pictures from the movie, which correlated with who was in the particular disc and placed the picture on the DVD.  The device works by downloading some software onto your computer and using your printer to print the images on a template which is a sticker.  Then you pull the sticker from the back and place it on the device that helps line up and evenly press the sticker onto the DVD.  It was really slick and worked well.  I also made copies of the DVD collection for the children of my grandparents to have as a memory of their life.  The label maker came in handy because I was able to print pictures of the individual families and place them on the DVD as a label.  Now my work was complete. 

E mail Project Reflection

In choosing a topic that utilizes the relationship between people and computers, I immediately thought about my grandparents and email.  My grandparents have been struggling with email for about a year now and I would like to assist them in finding an easy base from which to receive emails.  I will look at the major email browsers: Gmail, Excite, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. see what these sites have to offer and then setup and assist my grandparents in navigating the site.  One of the key aspects that I will be searching for is a large amount of space, as my grandparents have a lot of friends and are “pack-rats” when it comes to saving emails and other various items. 

            Hotmail was my first email provider, so I went to them first to see what they have to offer my grandparents.  At the Hotmail sign-in page one can find many of the options that they have to offer.  Hotmail boasts superior spam protection, and filters to keep the inbox free from junk mail.  Hotmail also offers a 250 megabyte storage capacity, with the capability of sending up to 10 megabytes files for sharing pictures.  My grandparents love their digital camera and take lots of pictures, but have not been able to send them yet.  The last thing I found on the homepage for Hotmail was that you can now personalize your background, fonts and other items to make sure that your email is 100 percent yours. 

            The basic “free” Hotmail account has some very appealing options when you sign up.  Once you sign up you instantly get an email that is fully functional, practical and easy to use.  When composing an email Hotmail offers spell check and a thesaurus to ensure proper grammar.  You can also set tasks and reminders for yourself in your account.  And when you sign in for a hotmail account you get a Windows Live ID which allows you to chat in an instant message setting with your friends. 

Upon further investigation in the Hotmail website I found that if you are willing to pay a yearly fee you can increase your storage capacity, and sending capacity greatly.  For only $19.95 a year the hotmail plus package offers a greater storage capacity of up to 2 gigabytes, and you can send up to 20 megabyte emails.  Along with the storage and sending upgrade, you don’t get much else.  Your account will never expire and your site will have no graphical ads on it, and you can access your email through Microsoft Outlook and you can read, compose and store email offline.  Hotmail Outlook Live offers the most options.  For a mere $44.95 per year you get all that was stated before plus some other options to help organize and keep make navigating through emails a little easier. 

The next email company I will investigate is the excite.com web-based email company.  The Excite website is an interactive website in which you can do a number of things and is rather exciting.  When you sign up you can personalize your site the way you want it.  You can have the stock report on your Excite homepage or the latest scores from your favorite college of professional sports teams, or even check the best fares for travel via expedia.com.   I enjoyed being able to get my horoscope on my homepage every time I log into my account.  Your very own Excite homepage will also allow you to get the latest news, whether it is business, sport, entertainment, health and you can add your cable or television provider and have the line-up of the day’s television shows.  Excite.com makes it very easy to navigate the internet from your very own personalized homepage.  When you sign up you get 125 megabytes of storage capacity, but you are not able to send huge files like through hotmail.  However, you can upgrade to Gold and get 2 gigabytes of storage plus extra spam filters, and larger sending capabilities for only $19.95 per year.  I feel that Excite is somewhat lacking in the email department, but as a homepage with email it is in my opinion the best out there. 

Yahoo.com is another major source for email and web browsing.  With Yahoo.com you can do similar things to that of Excite, but with the email you can receive 1 gigabyte of storage.  Within the email, tasks can be set; there is a calendar so you can keep all of your appointments straight; again very similar to the other email sites.  However, 1 gigabyte is the largest storage capacity that I have come across yet. Similar to Hotmail, when you sign up for an account you automatically get an ID for Yahoo Messenger, an instant messenger chat session area.  Within the email area, on the top right corner of the screen there is a Mail Tutorial section that will assist and define how email can be done using your Yahoo email account.  Of course for a fee $19.99 you can upgrade to Yahoo Plus account and get larger storage and sending capacities. 

Mail.com is another email provider that allows personalization of the email homepage.  This site offers free calendar, tasks, but also games and e-cards.  This is interesting and new to me.  E-cards are a great way to send greetings, or a birthday wishes except now they all cost money to use and send.  So mail.com is very enticing.  As always there are upgrades to be made, for a yearly fee that will enhance the performance of your emailing capabilities. 

Lycos mail is a small email provider that doesn’t seem to offer much with its free version of email.  For no fee you can get 5 megabytes of email storage space.  That is nominal compared to 1 gigabyte that Yahoo.com will allow.  This brings me to AOL email.  AOL email seems weird to me in the sense that AOL is something people pay to use, but they do offer free email to anyone with up to 2 gigabytes of storage.  However, if you are an AOL customer the storage is unlimited.  With the email, AOL boasts the best anti-spam and virus protection out there, as in the commercials.  Like Yahoo and Hotmail, once signed up you are instantly able to go on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and start chatting with your friends.  Plus with AOL you get the classic “You’ve Got Mail” voice when you receive an email. 

Gmail.com is the last on my list to look at for my grandparents. Gmail.com is powered by Google and offers an astonishing amount of storage space for free.  The number of megabytes keeps rising and you can watch a ticker that shows the rising number, but last I checked it was about 2700 megabytes or 2.7 gigabytes of storage.  This is enough to never have to delete another email again; well at least my grandparents won’t have to.  Gmail also offers chat feature in which you can instantly chat with your friends.  Gmail is an “experiment” in email so the Gmail site says.  The goal is to never have to delete another email, and be able to find exactly the email you are looking for using to unsurpassed quality that Google search has to offer.  There are calendar capabilities and you can surf the web from your email site using Google search. 

About my grandparents, they are both 71 years old and have little internet or email experience; although my grandma has more experience with the internet.  When I told them I would set up an account with them and offer my services to assist them in learning how to email and navigate the internet a little bit they were excited.  It was this excitement I was hoping for because it would make it easier to teach them how to email.  Surprisingly my grandparents both caught on fast to using and navigating the internet to find their email. 

The email provider my grandparents chose was Gmail from Google.  They both decided that they wanted a free account, and they both had heard of Google.  I think that they chose to go with Gmail because my brother, who in the Peace Corps in Mongolia uses a Gmail account.  It was a combination of the Google name and my brother that led them to choose a Gmail account.  Once they chose their provider I went ahead and told them to choose a name, or address they would like and we could see if it was still available.  Having them choose a name was a longer process than I thought, even after 51 years of marriage, they still had a hard time coming up with something they could both agree upon.  Well after about a day to trying to figure, along with some assistance from me they chose to use billnjo528@gmail.com.  It is their names and the date of their wedding anniversary, which I thought was suitable for them.  The also decided to use the names of their dogs as their password, which is a really strong because one of their dogs’ name has a number in it.  I don’t think anyone would be able to hack into their account.  My grandparents feel safe that their emails won’t be read by others.   

Well it took a little while to set up their account, which I did by myself seeing as they would have complications going through the process.  I found that I actually had problems getting them an account.  I had to have Google send me a text message to my phone with a confirmation number to set up their account.  This was a weird and only way to set up an email account through Gmail.  This process took me a while to figure out, but nevertheless they were able to get their account up and running.  Even though I was frustrated my grandparents were eager to learn and get started emailing their friends from Wyoming and Montana. Their excitement to learn taught me that even though they are old, they still have a thirst for knowledge and to me that is incredible.  I hope that when I am old I still have a drive to learn and attempt to master new projects.  Once the setup was complete it was time to teach them how to log into their account. 

I took the liberty of making Google their home page for easy log-in into the email.  I showed them that in the top right corner of the Google home page is the location of the hyperlink to log-in.  At this point they were able to find where to place their name and password.  From here they were able to navigate themselves to the email homepage to find an email from the Gmail team.  I then assisted them in making a contact list for quick emails to their closest friends and relatives, as well as showing them how to compose a new message and use the spell check. 

I then showed them the many other features Gmail has to offer, none of which were interesting to them.  I tried to show them the calendar, but they were perfectly content trying to master and use the email aspect to their account.  My grandparents were quick at learning how to use and send emails, which was exciting for me to watch.  I was thrilled to know that I helped them stay in touch with friends, whom before email they would only talk to on the phone maybe once every other week.  It was a good feeling, but next my grandpa wanted to learn how to send images from his digital camera. 

I told him he should attach the file to an email and his face turned white.  I realized that this might be a process, so I walked him through it.  First I had my grandpa bring up the picture files and we renamed them to what was in the picture, opposed to a few letters followed by many numbers.  Then I had him compose his email message and we proceeded to attach the pictures he wanted to send.  I told him to click on the Attach a file hyperlink, right next to the picture of the paper clip.  Then I showed him how to find the file containing the pictures and that double clicking on the file would automatically attach the picture to the email.  My grandpa also sent his first email with pictures to me so I could show him that it worked, as well as how to open the attached file so he can look at pictures from other people too.   

My grandparents did not wish to use any other feature from Gmail.  They were perfectly content using email and sending pictures.  However, I have found them using the Google search from their email account.  It was truly pleasing to see my grandparents develop and master the skills necessary to send and receive emails.  I believe that having this email account will bring them closer to their friends and obviously it will help them keep in touch with people all over the world.  My grandparents are now emailing people everyday and loving every minute of it. 

This project taught me to be patient, very patient.  What came easy to me was completely foreign to my grandparents.  I was amazed at the speed they learned how to email, but it was still a process to get them to understand me.  I also learned that teaching is a challenging and rewarding job.  Even though I was teaching two 71 year olds it was still rewarding.  I also learned that most free email accounts offer the same amounts of storage and sending size restrictions.  Although it was easy to find an email provider, it was hard to determine what provider to choose.  Each email provider claims to have the best spam filter and anti-virus protection in cyberspace.  I found that there is more space in the internet than I previously thought, but it brings us all closer together.